O-Live Chat: Quick and Patterson

Jason Quick held another one of his 2:00 Thursday chats today, hosted as always by the upward-voice-inflected “uh/you know” vocal stylings of Casey Holdahl. They had a special guest today, as Steve Patterson of all people joined in on the fray. You can listen to the full chat here, and following are the highlights – in a hail of bullets:

QUICK:

• Breaking news from today: Aldridge will be starting tomorrow against the Celtics. Nate still has concerns about Lamarcus getting in to foul trouble, but they’re going to give him the spot, the minutes and see what he can do.
• Stephen Graham will continue to start, and Webster will come off the bench.
• Another note that Quick pointed out was that with Aldridge and Pryzbilla, along with Roy and Udoka and Jack, they could have a VERY tough end-of-game defensive lineup.
• Regarding Sergio Rodriguez: The main reason he’s excelled has been because Brandon Roy is injured and he’s getting playing time. His past two games, he’s got 16 assists and 2 turnovers (Ed. Note: in less than 30 minutes in both games) and is making a big argument for more playing time. Eventually, he’s going to have to score/shoot a little bit more to be fully effective.
• Again, the language barrier came up with Sergio. He’s having trouble processing the in-game calls from the bench.
• Dan Dickau: really has no role with the team at this point. Nate has lost confidence in him, and Dan didn’t take advantage of the PT he was given when Roy went down.
• Quick’s preview of the game tomorrow against Boston: The highlight will be Telfair going against his old team. Telfair himself isn’t saying much other than he’s happy for a few of the guys he’s kept in contact with.

PATTERSON:

• When asked to pick out one thing that has been particularly happy with this season: the play of Zach Randolph.
• He mentioned the team’s consistently slow starts in the first quarter as his disappointing item thus far, identifying a combination of new players and injuries causing lineup changes as the main culprits.
• On Darius Miles: He does expect Miles to come back and play next year. He identified the range of success that’s been had with microfracture surgery … from the good (Zach Randolph and Jason Kidd) to the mediocre (Chris Webber) to the bad (Allan Houston).
• A bizarre question popped up regarding Joel Freeland. What are the team’s hopes next year? “He’s a young player, 19 years old, he needs to gain strength and work on his game but we’re very pleased with the way he’s played at the junior level over there, which is like college over here.”
• Patterson addressed the “Aldridge over Morrison” question, and broke it down like this: they essentially identified the four best players in the draft as two bigs – Bargnani and Aldridge – and two wings, Roy and Morrison. They wanted to get two of those four players, and when one of the big men went first, they went big man second so if they did get two they could get one big and one wing. Then Morrison went third, but the club was very excited to have a chance to acquire Roy and get a second top tier player.
• On Magloire’s performance, and how the trade has panned out: He’s fine with it. Blake’s not getting a lot of PT in Milwaukee (Editor’s note: and he wouldn’t be getting any here either), and Magloire needs to adjust to having some new teammates. He also mentioned how having Magloire has come in very handy with the injuries to Portland’s other front-court players.
• When asked about his own contract situation, he declined to respond to his specific situation, but he did say that they've been rebuilding the ballclub, season tickets have gone up, the community is responding to the new team, and overall he's very happy with the direction of the franchise.